The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

Bulkeley knew that if he and the others were caught plotting a rebellion against Cheap, and the established military command structure, they might, like Cozens, be shot before ever leaving the island. Even if they succeeded and made it back to England, they could be court-martialed by a panel of Cheap’s fellow officers and condemned to take a walk up Ladder Lane and down Hemp Street. As a historian once put it, “A mutiny is like a horrible, malignant disease and the chances that the patient will die an agonizing death are so great, that the subject cannot even be mentioned aloud.”

Ever the sea lawyer and narrator, he’d already been documenting in his journal every little event that, in his view, showed the captain to be unfit to lead. Now he needed to create an unassailable story—a timeless tale of the sea—which could withstand public scrutiny and the attrition of a legal battle. The first step was for Bulkeley to obtain the backing of Lieutenant Baynes. It was imperative that Baynes, as the next in the line of command, at least nominally assume the title of captain. This would help prove to the Admiralty that Bulkeley was not out to wantonly destroy naval order and take power for himself.

Still, how would they ever get this vessel into the sea? Weighing tons, it was too heavy for them to carry or drag along the sand, especially in their weakened condition. It was as if they had created the ark only to further torment themselves. Yet they found a solution: laying down a track of logs and letting the boat roll over them until it was launched into the sea. With salvaged ropes, they proudly hoisted the two wooden masts into the sky. And there the new longboat was—bobbing in the waves. The men christened her the Speedwell.

Not only did these vessels have to traverse some of the roughest seas on earth; most of the men attempting to pull off this feat were already near death. “The greatest part of the people on board are so regardless of life that they really appear quite indifferent whether they shall live or die,” Bulkeley wrote, “and it is with much entreaty that any of them can be prevailed on to come upon deck to assist for their preservation.”

Although Bulkeley was in most respects acting as the captain, Lieutenant Baynes officially remained the commanding officer. On October 30, two weeks into the voyage, the men were caught in another squall.

Soon afterward, the cutter split its mainsail and disappeared. Bulkeley and his party tacked back and forth, searching for the other boat each time the Speedwell crested above the waves. Yet there was no sight of the cutter—it must have gone under with all twelve men.

Bulkeley experienced the grief of losing men who were effectively under his command, and despite the cramped conditions inside the Speedwell’s berth, he retrieved his journal and carefully inscribed their names.

The next morning, as Bulkeley and his party resumed their voyage, they glimpsed on the barren ocean a wisp of white, dipping amid the waves and then rising again. It was the cutter’s sail! The boat was intact, and there were the dozen crew members—soaked and dazed but alive. The miraculous reunion, Bulkeley wrote, gave them all “new life.”

Bulkeley, based on these observations and on his calculations of the Speedwell’s latitude, was confident that they had reached the Strait of Magellan. After he tacked the Speedwell to the southeast, on the verge of realizing his plan, he betrayed a feeling that he rarely acknowledged: absolute fear. “I never in my life…have seen such a sea as runs here,” he observed. The winds were of typhoon strength, and the waters seemed at war with themselves.

(The chaplain wrote that God had seemingly “set himself against us,” and would not “withdraw his judgment till he had buried our bodies, and ships also, in the bottomless depth of the raging sea.”)

Each momentary reprieve seemed to intensify Bulkeley’s messianic fervor. He wrote of the storm, “We prayed earnestly for its clearing up, for nothing else could save us from perishing.”

“We were surrounded with rocks, and so near that a man might toss a biscuit on ’em,” he observed. Yet they slipped into the cove, which was as smooth as a millpond. “We call this harbour the Port of God’s Mercy, esteeming our preservation this day to be a miracle,” Bulkeley wrote. “The most abandoned among us no longer doubt of an Almighty Being, and have promised to reform their lives.”

Bulkeley made a very different sort of threat: if the misbehavior continued, he, along with Baynes and Cummins, would demand to be deposited onshore, leaving the others to fend for themselves on the boat. The crew knew that Bulkeley was indispensable—no one else could as monomaniacally plot their course and battle the elements—so his threat had a sobering effect. “The people have promised to be under government, and seem much easier,” Bulkeley wrote. To further pacify the men, he released a bit more flour from their stores, noting that many people eat the powder “raw as soon as they are served it.”

Among the casualties was a sixteen-year-old boy named George Bateman. “This poor creature starved, perished, and died a skeleton,” Bulkeley wrote, adding, “There are several more in the same miserable condition, and who, without a speedy relief, must undergo the same fate.”

“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.” The boy’s misery ended only when “heaven sent death to his relief.”

Cheap had not given up on his plan to rejoin Commodore Anson and the squadron. He had formed an alliance with the last of the seceders—desperation can also breed unity—and the combined group, after suffering one death, numbered nineteen, including Byron, Campbell, the marine lieutenant, Hamilton, and the surgeon, Elliot.

Cheap and the remaining men were living in the shelters at the outpost and foraging for seaweed and the occasional sea fowl.

They rowed hour after hour, day after day, occasionally stopping to peel seaweed off sunken rocks and make a meal of what they called “sea-tangle.”

The party now numbered eighteen, and without the yawl, there was no longer room to transport them all. Three more men could fit with difficulty in the barge, but four members of the party would have to remain behind—or they would all perish. Four marines were selected. Being soldiers, they lacked sailing skills.

He recorded each of the marines’ last names: Smith, Hobbs, Hertford, and Crosslet. Cheap distributed to them some armaments and a frying pan. “Our hearts melted with compassion for them,” Campbell wrote. As the barge sailed away, the four marines stood on the beach, gave them three cheers, and cried, “God bless the King!”

“We were now resigned to our fate,” Byron wrote, having given up “all thoughts of making any further attempt to double the cape.”

The castaways went back to the bay, in the hope of at least finding the marines. Somehow, they resolved they would squeeze them onboard. As Campbell wrote, “We considered that if the boat sunk, we then should be free from the miserable life we led, and die all together.” Yet, except for a musket lying on the beach, there was no trace of them. They had undoubtedly perished, but where were their bodies?

He heard a few of the castaways whispering about drawing lots and “consigning one man to death for the support of the rest.” This was different than when some of the men had earlier cannibalized dead bodies. This was killing a companion for food—a grisly ritual later imagined by the poet Lord Byron: The lots were made, and marked, and mixed, and handed, In silent horror, and their distribution Lulled even the savage hunger which demanded, Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution. In the end, the castaways could not go this far.

Without more food and fresh water, they, too, would soon perish. Two days later, they spied a herd of guanacos along the wooded bank. Bulkeley, with the eye of a predator, described the animal—a wild cousin of the llama—as being “as large as any English deer, with a long neck; his head, mouth, and ears, resembling a sheep.”

The tide rose and fell some forty feet, and there were often countervailing winds and eight-knot currents. It was nighttime when the castaways began sailing through the nine-mile-long chute, and they strained to see in the dark. For hours, they maneuvered between the shrouded banks, trying to avoid the shoals and curtail the boat’s constant leeward drift, until, at dawn, they emerged from the chute.

Bulkeley and his party had reached the strait’s eastern mouth, and were being swept into the Atlantic. They had not only made it through the 350-mile passageway in their jury-rigged boat; they had also, thanks to a remarkable feat of navigation by Bulkeley, taken, even with their initial false start, only thirty-one days—a week faster than Ferdinand Magellan and his armada.

Once again, they attempted to land a hunting party. But now the seas were so rough that they had to anchor at a distance from the shore. A man would have to swim through the breakers to reach the land. Most of the castaways, unable to swim and paralyzed with exhaustion, did not budge. Bulkeley, a nonswimmer as well, was required to helm the ship. But the boatswain, King, the carpenter, Cummins, and another man—propelled by courage or desperation or perhaps both—leapt into the water.

But his mind was fading. Once, he thought he saw butterflies snowing from the sky. On January 28, 1742, the boat was blown toward the shore, and Bulkeley perceived a tableau of strange shapes. Was it another mirage? He looked again. The shapes, he was sure, were wooden structures—houses—and they were situated on the edge of a major river. It had to be the port of Rio Grande on the southern border of Brazil.

After the castaways had spent three and a half months traversing nearly three thousand miles, they had reached the safety of Brazil. As the Speedwell drifted into the port, a crowd of townspeople gathered. They gaped at the battered, waterlogged vessel with its sun-bleached, shredded sails.

William Oram—who had helped build the Speedwell and had completed the entire odyssey—soon died. The party, which had set out from Wager Island with eighty-one men, had dwindled to twenty-nine.

Published six months after Bulkeley and Cummins had returned to England, the book was called simply A Voyage to the South-Seas, in the Years 1740–1.

As Bulkeley had learned from his voyage, a reprieve rarely lasts—it is inevitably shattered by some unforeseen event. And it was not long before excited reports began appearing in the press that Commodore George Anson, the man who had led the expedition, was blazing a trail across the Pacific.

Anson stood on the quarterdeck of the Centurion, staring across the vast, watery expanse off the southeastern coast of China. It was April 1743, and it had been two years since he had lost sight of the Wager. He still did not know what had happened to the ship, only that she was gone. As for the Pearl and the Severn, he knew their officers had turned their scurvy-ridden, storm-beaten vessels back around Cape Horn—a decision that had caused the Pearl’s captain to see himself in “no other light than a disgrace.”

Three quarters of the Gloucester’s roughly four hundred men had already perished, and after the remainder were transferred to the Centurion—most of them so sick that they had to be hoisted onboard on wooden grates—Anson had the Gloucester’s hull set on fire to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. He watched as its wooden world ignited, producing what one of his lieutenants, Philip Saumarez, called “as melancholy a scene as I ever observed since I have been in the Navy.”

His forces had withered from some 2,000 to a mere 227, and many of them were just boys. He had only a third of the complement required to properly operate a man-of-war of the Centurion’s size.

Millechamp noted that the sight of Anson, along with all the other senior officers, sharing in the hardest tasks made everyone “endeavour to excel, and indeed we soon found that our work went on with great spirit and vigour.” Three weeks after the Centurion went missing, it reappeared. The ship had been damaged while being swept out to sea; all this time its crew had struggled to return. After a joyous reunion, Anson pressed on with their voyage around the world.

The Spanish called the galleon Our Lady of Covadonga. The men inside it must have recognized that they were being chased. But they did not attempt to flee, perhaps because of courage, or perhaps because they did not expect the Centurion to be in any condition to fight. They were under the command of an experienced officer, Gerónimo Montero, who had served on the Covadonga for fourteen years. He had orders to defend the treasure-filled ship to the death, and if necessary to blow it up before it fell into enemy hands.

Anson peered through his telescope, trying to assess the enemy’s strength. The galleon’s gun deck extended 124 feet—20 feet shorter than the Centurion’s. And compared to the Centurion’s sixty cannons, many of which fired twenty-four-pound balls, the galleon had only thirty-two guns, the largest mere twelve-pounders. In terms of firepower, the Centurion was clearly superior. But Montero had one crucial advantage. His ship was carrying 530 people—300 more than the Centurion—and the men on the Covadonga were generally healthy.

rather than assign at least eight people to operate each cannon, as was customary, he designated just two. Each pair would be strictly responsible for loading and sponging the muzzle. Meanwhile, several squads, each consisting of about a dozen people, would be tasked with sprinting from gun to gun—running them forward and lighting them. Anson hoped that this approach would allow him to maintain a continuous blaze of fire.

Having noticed that the galleon’s plank sidings above the gunwales were surprisingly low, which left its officers and crew exposed on deck, Anson stationed a dozen of his finest marksmen on the mast tops. Perched high above the sea, they would have a clear vantage point for picking off their enemies.

Anson guided his ship across the galleon’s wake, and then swiftly came abreast of the Covadonga from the leeward side, so it would be harder for Montero to escape downwind.

The moment after a squad on the Centurion discharged a cannon, the men ran the gun back in and closed the porthole to shield themselves from incoming fire. Then the two loaders began to swab the sizzling barrel and prepare the next round while the squad raced on to another loaded cannon—priming it and pointing it and lighting the match, then jumping out of the way before they became casualties of their own recoiling two-ton weapon.

The fighting continued, the noise so deafening that Anson conveyed his orders with hand signals.

When Saumarez stepped onboard the Covadonga, he recoiled at seeing its decks “promiscuously covered with carcasses, entrails and dismembered limbs.” One of Anson’s men confessed that war was awful to anyone with a “humane disposition.” The British had lost just three men; the Spanish had seen nearly seventy killed and more than eighty injured. Anson sent his surgeon across to help attend to their wounded, including Montero.

Spain’s colonial plunder was now Britain’s. It was the largest treasure ever seized by a British naval commander—the equivalent today of nearly $80 million. Anson and his party had captured the greatest prize of all the oceans.

A share of the prize money was given to each seaman: about three hundred pounds, some twenty years’ worth of wages. Anson, who was soon promoted to rear admiral, was awarded about ninety thousand pounds—the equivalent today of $20 million.

Amid all the hoopla, the scandalous Wager affair seemed to blissfully fade away. But almost two years later, on a March day in 1746, a boat arrived in Dover, carrying a thin, stern man with eyes fixed like bayonets. It was the long-lost Captain David Cheap, and accompanying him were the marine lieutenant, Thomas Hamilton, and the midshipman John Byron.

Even so, the castaways’ accounts betrayed their inherent racism. Byron routinely referred to Patagonians as “savages,” and Campbell complained, “We durst not find the least fault with their conduct, they looking upon themselves as our masters, and we finding ourselves obliged to submit to them in all things.”

When Byron plucked some berries to eat, one of the Chono snatched them from his hand, indicating that they were poisonous. “Thus, in all probability, did these people now save my life,” Byron wrote.

By the early 1900s, Great Britain had become the largest empire in history, ruling over 400 million people and a quarter of the earth’s landmass.